Articles in Category: November

Here is an internal student collaborated project with Jason Ryan as director and animator, with support from RJDM Studios. Basically Jason would take shots to animate during his live weekly demos and, as a director, review shots that students had volunteer for. It was a great collaborative process and gave a studio feel to it.

It all started with mirrors. Spurred on by its insatiable hunger for the unknown, Reddit’s gaming community flitted between poring brainpower over why reflections don’t commonly appear in FPS games, the inevitable meme-orized destruction of the topic, non-Euclidean mind trips, and kittens. Eventually, the Jeopardy-like attention span shifted to first-person animation design. Discussion threads sprouted, recipes were shared, an expert was called in: Infinity Ward animator Chance Glasco who, in a weekend AMA thread, shared knowledge on the intricacies of constructing and positioning some of the most frequently glimpsed weapon animations of the genre from the Call of Duty series.

As someone who has been back and forth between games and film for many years, I thought it might be interesting to offer my perspective on what I think are vastly different animation pipelines.

In my opinion, when it comes to animation, games and film begin their production process needing (not wanting) vastly different things, and this ultimately sets the tone for how animation is critiqued, processed and approved over the course of almost the entire project.